Our next featured artist, Maria Mendl, will perform her narrative essay Junior at the FOOT 2016 Solo Performance Cabaret. She describes this work, which explores issues of care giving, health and motherhood, as both “creative non-fiction” and “philosophy in narrative form”My essay “Junior” appeared in 2014 in The M Word, an anthology of essays by women with all sorts of relationships to motherhood. It’s work of creative non-fiction, without as much interpretation as an academic paper might have; nonetheless, I think of it as a philosophy essay in narrative form.
BIO
Maria Meindl is the author of Outside the Box: the Life and Legacy of Mona Gould, the Grandmother I Thought I Knew from McGill-Queen’s University Press, winner of the Alison Prentice award for women’s history. Her essay “Rules” appeared in Twelve Breaths a Minute, an anthology on death published by Creative Non Fiction, and her story “The Last Judgment” was published in digital form from Found Press. Her essay “Junior” was published in The M Word: Conversations about Motherhood from Goose Lane Editions in 2014.
Maria’s essays, poetry and fiction have appeared in journals including The Literary Review of Canada, Descant, Musicworks and Queen Street Quarterly. She has made two series for CBC Radio’s Ideas: Parent Care and Remembering Polio. Maria is the founder of Draft, a literary reading series which features new work by established and emerging writers. She teaches movement classes in downtown Toronto and is a first-year PhD student at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Toronto.
FOOT 2016 